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Forescout found 22 internet-facing Rockwell Automation programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in cities hit by recent cyberattacks on US water utilities. Nineteen used the same mobile carrier network.
Its August 3 scan counted 4,407 exposed Rockwell controllers worldwide, including 2,844 in the United States, but Forescout could not confirm any were compromised. That figure counts exposed
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our terrifying tech tale comes courtesy of Marc Bishop, director of business growth at Wytlabs, a marketing and SEO company. In the course of his career, Bishop came across one firm where the people guarding the henhouse left the keys out where almost anyone could get them. Bishop’s client company was responsible on the surface. They had a strong password policy and even made users take security training. Then they moved offices, and that's when basic security hygiene went out the window. The company decided to take some old laptops and give them out to new users. To make life easy for the recipients, they put sticky notes – everyone’s favorite credential-sharing tool – on the laptops with the name of each employee and their initial login credentials on it. Let’s just stop for a moment to remark on how bad it is to put usernames and passwords on a piece of paper where the wrong person could see them. Even the IT department should not know your password, should someone in IT themselves turn rogue. So, even if the laptop stayed on a shelf in a closet that only the support staff had access to, having that sticky note would be bad. However, our situation is even worse because the laptops in question were stored in a conference room while the facilities team finished readying the office for the move. During that time, anyone who had access to the conference room could go in and get multiple user account credentials. And that's exactly what happened: A contractor entered the conference room and took pictures of the sticky notes. This non-employee later logged in remotely and accessed all kinds of proprietary data, including planning documents that were sitting on shared drives. What’s particularly shocking about this story is that the IT department was the cause of the information leak. People who work in tech and are charged with maintaining security should never put a password, even a temporary password, out in the open. Password security is paramount. If someone is starting with a new account, send the credentials through an encrypted channel - and preferably ensure only the intended recipient can view the temporary password. ®
Coinspect has identified CryptoJS.lib.WordArray.random() as the weak random number generator behind the Ill Bloom wallet drains.
Introduced in the JavaScript cryptography library 12 years ago, the function supplied weak entropy that affected wallet apps used to generate recovery phrases. Coinspect's on-chain analysis puts the measured theft across two sweeps since late May at a lower bound of
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security issue with Apple's iCloud Private Relay tool that can expose a user's real IP address.
Introduced with iOS 15, iCloud Private Relay employs a dual-hop architecture to ensure users' privacy by routing their Safari web traffic through two relays so that no single third-party, including Apple, can determine where the request is originating from
A new class of prompt injection is spreading across commercial websites. It requires no malware, no stolen credentials, and no zero-day exploit. It abuses a standard feature built into almost every major AI assistant: pre-filled deep links.
We observed production websites embedding hidden prompt injection payloads inside "Ask AI" buttons on marketing and competitor comparison pages. When a user
Attackers broke into an organization's Oracle database through a SQL injection flaw in a public-facing web application, then installed a post-exploitation toolkit without writing an executable to disk. They fed Java source code to the database, let Oracle compile it into stored schema objects, and ran commands from inside the database engine.
Huntress, which tracks the toolkit as khunt,
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Security flaws in agent infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Vercel let untrusted or forged instructions reach an agent's tools with no check that a model turn had authorized them.
In several of the attack paths, the model never ran at all, so system prompts, content filters, and model-level guardrails never got a chance to intervene.
The affected products include Amazon
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a "factory-shipped backdoor" implanted in at least 20 Chinese router models from Zbtlink.
According to a new report from VulnCheck, the implant appears in all 21 firmware images currently available from Zbtlink that span more than 2 years. The backdoors are designed such that they start automatically and attempt to beacon to Chinese
A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, sentenced Maksim Silnikau to 16 years in prison on August 5 for creating and running Ransom Cartel, the ransomware-as-a-service operation he stood up in 2021.
Between 2021 and 2023, Ransom Cartel conspirators attacked at least 18 companies, including firms in California, New York and Nebraska, and others abroad, according to the Justice Department.
A newly patched security flaw impacting on-premise versions of JetBrains TeamCity has come under active exploitation in the wild, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), a case of deserialization of untrusted data that could allow an unauthenticated attacker with access to a TeamCity server
Connor Riley Moucka pleaded guilty in Seattle federal court on Wednesday to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and a related conspiracy over the 2024 breaches of Snowflake customer accounts.
The intrusions reached at least 165 organizations and exposed records belonging to at least 100 million people. Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, personally took at least $495,000 from
Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously attempts to reach a command and control server on the internet.” “Zbtlink routers phone home, waiting for orders. Not because they were hacked. Because they were shipped that way.” Baines named the backdoor “ENDLESSDOORS” and says it’s “a small tool called rctl (remote control linux). Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple command and control client and server. The server listens on port 7000 for clients to connect. It can send the client individual shell commands or tell the client to spawn a reverse bash shell.” The CTO says he spotted the alleged backdoor running in dedicated Linux kernel threads. “They are ordinary userland processes running as root, with real memory footprints, named to disappear into a crowd of legitimate ones,” he wrote. “They are an implant, a phone-home trojan horse.” “There is no handshake, no key exchange, no negotiation,” Baines added. “When the implant reaches a server, it sends a fixed 39-byte hello: a 33-byte class label padded with nulls, then its LAN MAC address. That's the whole registration. There is no client or server verification.” “Anyone along the network path can hijack the client/server communication,” the CTO wrote, adding that anyone who controls one of the endpoints the software targets – rbdg4nzqadui[.]wikaba[.]com – “can control any ENDLESSDOORS implant that tries to phone home.” The Register asked Zbtlink to comment and a spokesperson told us VulnCheck has mischaracterized the code it found. “This feature is solely intended for after‑sales maintenance and serves no other purposes,” the company rep told The Register. “It is generally retained only on sample units to assist customers with software debugging and will not be included in mass‑production shipments.” That explanation didn’t seem entirely credible once The Register visited Zbtlink’s download page to check Baines’ claim that the firmware for over 20 router models contains the backdoor, because the page contained the following text: Update on Router Firmware Security Remediation We have detected firmware security vulnerabilities affecting selected router firmware releases. As a precautionary measure, the impacted firmware versions have been temporarily taken down from download channels. Our engineering team is working intensively to develop and validate secured patched firmware. The Wayback Machine’s most recent snapshot of the page, taken on July 31, contains no such admission and a long list of firmware downloads. Zbtlink has therefore told The Register it has no security problems, even as it publicly acknowledges that it does. ”The Zbtlink spokesperson also told us the company “specializes in OEM and ODM customization services. Our customers use their own self-developed software instead of ZBT’s default firmware.” It would not be hard to develop custom code as the OpenWrt open-source router firmware project supports at least one Zbtlink product. Indeed, the company has previously promoted its use of OpenWrt and options that allow clients to quickly create custom firmware packages. VulnCheck says the devices it tested phone home to just four endpoints, only one of which uses a domain name connected to Zbtlink. Baines labelled that connection “damning.” The Register notes that as router firmware could be a tasty target for perpetrators of a supply chain attack. No prior disclosure Baines decided the situation was so serious that the conventions of responsible coordinated disclosure were not applicable. “Coordinated disclosure exists to give a vendor time to fix a defect,” he wrote. “It assumes the vendor did not intend the behavior.” “That assumption doesn't hold here. This isn't a memory corruption bug in a parser. It's a component in the vendor’s product, started at boot by the vendor's own init script, shipped across twenty models and years of images. There is no patch to coordinate. Telling the shipper that they shipped it buys the owners of these devices nothing, and buys whoever operates that infrastructure a warning.” VulnCheck says Zbtlink kit is sold under that brand, or as ZBT, ZBTWiFi and Wiflyer, and found them for sale on Amazon, Alibaba, and Shopify. Given Zbtlink’s admission it allows its customers to customize its hardware, countless other devices could be at risk. Baines’ post includes rules to block access to the endpoints the routers contact, for Suricata, Snort, and YARA, plus advice on how to detect possibly infected machines. He also advises users “to replace the device, or at minimum move it behind strict egress control and treat its LAN as untrusted.” ®
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